Massive bust of Chinese-Australian drug syndicate, 4 arrested

February 27, 2019 | Brainwave Science

SITUATION

Two Australian and two Chinese men have been arrested by the Australian Federal Police in Melbourne on Tuesday. 1.3 tonnes of ephedrine has been seized after a joint investigation into a multimillion-dollar drug syndicate. There was close coordination between the AFP and the Chinese authorities. The latter tipped off the former about a suspected drug syndicate importing into Melbourne. The AFP immediately started an investigation. The Australian men are in their 50s and the two Chinese men are both 26 years old.

In mid-February, Australian Border Force officers intercepted a container coming in from China labelled as ‘ceramic tiles and glue’. Officers inspected the suspicious shipment and found 260 bags of powder hidden inside 65 boxes. Test results came back positive for ephedrine, with a total weight of 1,300 kilograms. The substance had the potential to make 922 kilograms of methamphetamine, or ice, with an estimated street value of $691.5 million.

The drugs were seized by the AFP, but the boxes were still delivered to a house in Box Hill North, where the two Chinese men were arrested. Meanwhile, the 55-year-old Australian man was arrested as he tried to board a flight to China at Melbourne International Airport on Tuesday.

Police then swooped on the 53-year-old Australian man, who was arrested at a shopping centre near to where his home was. All four men are scheduled to appear before Melbourne Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday. The two Melbourne men have been charged with importing commercial quantities of border-controlled precursors and face up to 25 years behind bars.

The two Chinese men have been charged with attempt to import commercial quantities of border-controlled precursors and face the maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.

AFP Assistant Commissioner Organized Crime Bruce Hill said the arrests mark another milestone in the cooperation between Australian and Chinese law enforcement.

CHALLENGE

This is a major bust by the Chinese and Australian Authorities which shows the power of coordination between governments and agencies. Law enforcement agencies must continue to come up with ways like these in which synergies are exploited to bust crime quicker and in a less costly manner.

If the two countries had not coordinated then this drug trade would have gone on for a longer time, leading to the continued destruction of the health of drug users and continued funding of criminal gangs. The next job of the authorities in addition to continuing investigation is to effectively interrogate the four men. This will help amass valuable information about the drug trade and help catch other members of this gang. Intelligence gathering is imperative to bringing down international drug smuggling organizations like this.

At the same time, the information possessed by the arrested suspects must be used efficiently in order to find links to other organizations, discover high ranking members, verify links to previous crimes.

There is a plethora of information which the arrested men know of. They may either know where the drugs originated from and where they were headed, or they may know persons who know this. This is of extreme importance to the investigative authorities for future use and to help link them to a criminal organization, to establish their level of involvement in this crime, gather intelligence about discovering new trafficking routes and methods. This information can help the AFB and Chinese authorities to quickly adapt and patrol critical checkpoints, and nab the perpetrators.

To elicit huge quantities of information, authorities are likely to spend a lot of time, money and manpower. This is a crime of ever-changing nature, where trafficking routes and methods routinely change in order to avoid detection, timely action is important and there is need of an investigation method which can gather intelligence quickly and screen the arrested persons for crime-related information. The AFB does not want to detain those who are innocent and for the guilty to slip through.

The challenge is that current investigative methods are costly, time-consuming, require manpower and may involve torture. Modern science must assist law enforcement agencies with technology which enables quick screening and gathering intelligence in an objective and scientific manner.

The human brain is the epicentre of all data processing and storage. Important information is stored for long periods of time such as months and years or until death and passive information is forgotten over time. Similarly, specific crime events are recorded permanently in the perpetrator’s brain because it is a significant process and activity. iCognative is safe and non-invasive, does not violate any human rights, can be applied to 85% -95% of cases, and has a high accuracy rate of over 99.9% eliminating false positives or false negatives. While DNA and Biometrics have similar accuracy, they can only be applied in 1-2% of cases as many crimes do not have biological samples.

During a crime investigation, iCognative is used to determine a suspect’s involvement in a crime by measuring the tiny voltages emitted from the brain when specific crime-related evidence in form of pictures, images, words, texts, or phrases are flashed on a computer screen. These inputs are also called stimuli. The brain reaction is captured and analyzed to determine whether the information as evidence is present in the suspect’s brain or not. However, the information provided to the subject/suspect must be crime-specific.

In the iCognative test of each of the arrested trafficking suspects, the stimuli can be trafficking-related details like the entry and exit ports of the drug shipments in China and Australia, places where these drugs are known to be processed like labs, known peddlers further down the supply chain, busted drug labs, known details of traffickers higher up or lower down the supply chain, CCTV, email and phone records of the four men, etc.

Using iCognative on a national and international scale with cooperation from neighbouring nations will help the Chinese Authorities and AFB to quickly discover linkages between organizations, understand supply chains, detect traffickers and their modus operandi, and help to end the drug trade in the region.